If we want to grow the circle, we need games that give more and ask less.
I have often sat across from a friends and family and thought about how difficult would it be to get them to play.
My mother, for instance, spent years mentioning roleplaying as “the weird little games” I wasted my life with. One day we were at the living room during a visit (my children, both experienced roleplayers, were around) and I decided to demonstrate. I took a fairly simply scenario of Call of Cthulhu I know by heart (“Dead Light”) and a coin, and run the scenario for her.
I improvised a system of simply flipping a coin for every test, adjusting with advantage or disadvantage depending on circumstances. And it worked very well. For a first time player, but with an exceptionally experienced game master.
Most RPGs aren’t built for people like my mother. They’re built for gamers. And many are built for experienced GMs like myself.
On one end, you have mechanically dense games full of classes, traits, feats, and numerical abstractions that reward people who enjoy optimization or tactical problem-solving. On the other end, you have minimalist storygames that present themselves as “accessible” but silently expect every player to act like a co-GM, shaping scenes, heightening drama, crafting character and story arcs.
What both types have in common is this: they assume a certain kind of player, someone already fluent in the grammar of games. Someone who either wants to master a system or help build a story.
But what about the rest? What about the people who don’t want to “play the game” or “craft a narrative,” but simply want to be someone else, in a different world, with other people?
We need more RPGs for them.
Not Everyone Wants to Be a GM
Many storygames and RPGs flatten the ruleset to make play feel lighter. But in doing so, they shift the weight elsewhere: onto the players’ shoulders. You don’t just control your character. You’re asked to invent dramatic turns, describe settings, structure scenes. The design is elegant, but the experience is demanding.
In such cases, it is not the rules that are inaccessible, it’s the role. These games ask every player to be part GM, part screenwriter. And that’s a lot to carry if you’re new to the table.
A truly accessible RPG shouldn’t require you to engineer drama. It should ask only that you show up, wear a mask, and embrace the fictional world.
The Beauty of Average People
One of the reasons I value Call of Cthulhu particularly is that it starts you off impersonating an ordinary person. There are no classes to choose from, no special abilities to coordinate. Just someone who might be a librarian, a professor, a journalist, ie, someone who walks into something terrible and has to respond as best they can.
Even if CoC has a cluttered character sheet, a few overlapping systems, and more combat complexity than it needs (although I do think CoC combat is very good), it offers one of the best detail-to-complexity tradeoffs amongst RPGs. It trusts players to immerse themselves without needing to build characters optimized for power. It rewards fear, doubt, stealth, and retreat just as much, maybe more, than confrontation. And that opens the door to a kind of roleplaying that feels grounded, emotional, human.
Completely minimalistic designs like Lasers and Feelings don’t meet these requirements. Lasers and Feelings is too simple. Character descriptions are not inspiring, and the GM has to rule on too many situations, making the players feel uninspired and without firm grounding, and putting a lot of responsibility on the GM.
We can do better. We can design systems even simpler: truly classless, low-powered, low-friction games that help players enter character quickly, with minimal choices and maximum room to breathe. Not rules-light in the sense of story-first, but player-centered in the sense of letting you inhabit someone else before you have to understand anything. And this also calls for systems that are intuitive, ie, where the fictional results of actions are reasonable.
It is too hard to be the GM
Many people avoid the role of GM, and having a GM is really the single most important requirement in playing an RPG. Yes, there are many so-called “GMLess” games, but in fact what they do is, like in many indie games, give to each player the responsibilities of a GM. That doesn’t solve the problem. It can arguably make it worse. To make the GM role more accessible, we need to demystify it. To demystify, it is essential that the rules are easy and preparation short, along with simple clear instructions on how to handle common situations, how to set up common challenges/encounters.
And we need to stop giving the impression that there is something particularly special about being the GM, or that as a GM you are singly responsible for a successful RPG experience.
Games That Give More and Require Less
This is the heart of it. Most games, even the “easy” ones, require too much of new players. Too much narrative awareness. Too much mechanical fluency. Too much background knowledge about genre, structure, or what “good play” looks like.
What we need are games that give first.
Give immersion.
Give atmosphere.
Give a character that feels like a person, not a build.
Give a world that resists, breathes, and invites exploration.
Give great experiences.
And ask only for attention, curiosity, and willingness.
These are the games that will enlarge the circle. That will bring in people who didn’t think they belonged at the table. Not just gamers or writers or performers, but friends, family, colleagues. People who want to try on another life, if only for a few hours. People who want to live beside others in a world they don’t have to invent, only enter.
A Different Kind of Accessibility
Accessibility isn’t just about page count or rules crunch. It’s about ease of entry into the fiction. It’s about lowering the emotional and performative demands placed on new players. It’s about letting someone play their first game without feeling like they’re failing to entertain the group.
That’s why we need more RPGs that offer inhabited experience, not co-authored fiction. Games where you don’t need to think like a GM, or talk like a novelist, or act like a voice actor. Games that simply say: Here’s your role. You’re in the world. What do you do?
That’s all it takes to start.
And if the design is good, that’s all it should take.
The Work Ahead
We don’t need another toolkit for narrative arcs. We don’t need another rules-light improv engine. We need a new wave of RPGs designed not for gamers, but for people, those who want to step into another life together, while making the GM’s work as simple as possible.
Let’s build games that invite presence, not performance.
Games that guide without scripting.
Games that are generous, forgiving, and alive.
Because the magic of roleplaying isn’t in how well you tell a story.
It’s in how deeply you believe the mask while you’re wearing it and how much of the person beside you you’re willing to believe, too.
Comments
Post a Comment